The Tropical MBA

I’ve been SUPER busy trying to orient my actions on revenue-focused activities. Sean, Ian, and myself often use that sentence as a rubric for planning our days out. “Are these activities revenue-focused?” While part of me would prefer to be reading blogs, writing comments, and screwing around around on twitter, a lot of my non-revenue activties this month have involved banking, offices, personnel, and condos.

I spent the day visiting an impressively ambitious internet startup here in Manila. I found myself missing my office days– a little. It was tons of fun to see office comraderie, leather couches, power lunches, killer work stations, and big LCD screens. I realized my longing is well-timed with a few other rumblings in my behavior. Let’s call them”entrepreneurial nesting instincts.”

Man, I’ve been blabbing on for weeks about how I’m going to share the nuts and bolts of what we are doing at the Tropical MBA. I am just talking a lot of junk.

Here’s the truth: I’m not even talking nuts and bolts with Sean.

I’m here in Ao Nang beach with my business partner Ian. We’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming for all of our businesses. We’ve decided that on the Lifestyle Business Podcast and here at the Tropical MBA we are going to focus primarily on how to build successful businesses.

I made the jump to location independence before it made sense. My business wasn’t ready, neither were my friends, family, or business partners. Hell, I wasn’t even sure if I was ready. There are a lot of reasons why I was brought to finally take the plunge– but by living this lifestyle for two years now I’ve realized that a lot of my initial worries (and the warnings of just about everyone) weren’t that helpful or predictive of how things played out

VIDEO INCLUDED: I love the idea of baselining your expenses and going into hardcore “start-up” mode. My whole business could blow up in my face and I could stay in a place like this for years before having to get a job. That would give me plenty of time to build another business that could fund a great lifestyle. Click the blog title to check out the video.

VIDEO BLOG: I believe in the next decade we are going to see a huge relocation of ambitious, talented, online business people re-locating to premier lifestyle locations in the developing world. Here’s the kicker: affordability is only one reason. I’ve got a slew of reasons why relocating to the developing world can help jump start your online start up, and I’ll be pulling together videos on that topic over the next few weeks.

During the course of my corporate career, I’ve made the final call in over 20 full time personnel decisions. All high dollar employees, all in-depth hiring processes. I have never, in the course of 5 years, seen such high quality applicants for a position. To me this is striking, and definitely a strong entrepreneurial lesson.

We are still alive and kicking and will be accepting applications until the last hour of November 30th. Thanks to everyone who has applied, we’ve received some incredible applications. We’ll be reviewing them in full December 1st.
Cheers from the Philippines,
Dan

Things get kick started December 1st. Stay tuned until then!